Category: The Dish

Mervyn Cadwallader’s 1966 article "Marriage as a Wretched Institution," from the Atlantic archives rants against the rigidity of marriage. Dan Savage’s and my thoughts on marriage here. Cadwallader’s argument:

Parents, teachers, and concerned adults all counsel against premature marriage. But they rarely speak the truth about marriage, as it really is in modern middle-class America. The truth as I see it is that contemporary marriage is a wretched institution. It spells the end of voluntary affection, of love freely given and joyously received. Beautiful romances are transmuted into dull marriages, and eventually the relationship becomes constricting, corrosive, grinding, and destructive. The beautiful love affair becomes a bitter contract.
[…]

What do we do, what can we do, about this wretched and disappointing institution? In terms of the immediate generation, the answer probably is, not much. Even when subjected to the enormous strains I have described, the habits, customs, traditions, and taboos that make up our courtship and marriage cycle are uncommonly resistant to change. Here and there creative and courageous individuals can and do work out their own unique solutions to the problem of marriage. Most of us simply suffer without understanding and thrash around blindly in an attempt to reduce the acute pain of a romance gone sour. In time, all of these individual actions will show up as a trend away from the old and toward the new, and the bulk of sluggish moderates in the populations will slowly come to accept this trend as part of social evolution. Clearly, in middle-class America, the trend is ever toward more romantic courtship and marriage, earlier premarital sexual intercourse, earlier first marriages, more extramarital affairs, earlier first divorces, more frequent divorces and remarriages. The trend is away from stable lifelong monogamous relationships toward some form of polygamous male-female relationship. Perhaps we should identify it as serial or consecutive polygamy, simply because Americans in significant numbers are going to have more than one husband or more than one wife. Attitudes and laws that make multiple marriages (in sequence, of course) difficult for the romantic and sentimental among us are archaic obstacles that one learns to circumvent with the aid of weary judges and clever attorneys.

Now, the absurdity of much of this lies in the fact that we pretend that marriages of short duration must be contracted for life. Why not permit a flexible contract perhaps for one or two or more years, with period options to renew? If a couple grew disenchanted with their life together, they would not feel trapped for life. They would not have to anticipate and then go through the destructive agonies of divorce. They would not have to carry about the stigma of marital failure, like the mark of Cain on their foreheads. Instead of a declaration of war, they could simply let their contract lapse, and while still friendly, be free to continue their romantic quest. Sexualized romanticism is now so fundamental to American life—and is bound to become even more so—that marriage will simply have to accommodate itself to it in one way or another. For a great proportion of us it already has.

What of the children in a society that is moving inexorably toward consecutive plural marriages? Under present arrangements in which marriages are ostensibly lifetime contracts and then are dissolved through hypocritical collusions or messy battles in court, the children do suffer. Marriage and divorce turn lovers into enemies, and the child is left to thread his way through the emotional wreckage of his parents’ lives. Financial support of the children, mere subsistence; is not really a problem in a society as affluent as ours. Enduring emotional support of children by loving, healthy, and friendly adults is a serious problem in America, and it is a desperately urgent problem in many families where divorce is unthinkable. If the bitter and poisonous denouement of divorce could be avoided by a frank acceptance of short-term marriages, both adults and children would benefit. Any time husbands and wives and ex-husbands and ex-wives treat each other decently, generously, and respectfully, their children will benefit.

The braver and more critical among our teenagers and youthful adults will still ask, But if the institution is so bad, why get married at all? This is a tough one to deal with. The social pressures pushing any couple who live together into marriage are difficult to ignore even by the most resolute rebel. It can be done, and many should be encouraged to carry out their own creative experiments in living together in a relationship that is wholly voluntary. If the demands of society to conform seem overwhelming, the couple should know that simply to be defined by others as married will elicit married-like behavior in themselves, and that is precisely what they want to avoid. How do you marry and yet live like gentle lovers, or at least like friendly roommates? Quite frankly, I do not know the answer to that question.

Using Marc’s projections for which candidate will win each state, a reader created this hypothetical delegate counter. To view the spreadsheet as an excel document click here. The reader writes:

1.  Marc didn’t provide a point spread which, given the proportional distribution of delegates, is really the key metric (yup, I side with Hillary on this one; its about delegates, not states).  I made up the numbers basing them, where I could, on polling data from Pollster.com.  Where there wasn’t data, I just made it up based on Marc’s predictions.  In some cases Marc makes wild predictions (Massachusetts doesn’t seem like much of a toss up to me…), in which case, I corrected his error (but of course the beauty of this is you can go an play with the numbers yourself and see what the effect is).

2. Actual delegates are awarded by congressional district and so the split really depends on the spread within district.  But that would be way too much work for a back of the envelope calculation.  So I just allocate delegates by percent spread.

3.  I included some separate analysis at the bottom to see what the effect of adding Michigan and Florida would be.

4.  Superdelegates are based on the NYTimes count as of Jan 23 with Teddy and Gov. Sebalius added in (the two I’m familiar with).  This is easily updated as endorsements come in.

5. The last column is called "marginal effect".  This is just a basic calculation showing the effect that a one percentage point change in a candidate’s vote percentage has on the delegate total.  So, what is the delegate pay off for putting in the effort to get a one percentage point shift in the polls?  This basically just confirms the obvious, but its interesting to put some actual numbers on it.  For instance, in American Samoa you would need to move the polls 5 percentage points to get just 1 delegate.

6. What’s nice about the spreadsheet is you can play with the numbers and the results are fairly sensitive to minor changes in the vote spread.  For most states, a two percentage point change in the spread yields a change in the delegate count.  This of course, is not true of the very big states. 

7. I haven’t included any of the post Feb 5 states (it would be easy to do of course), but the "needed to win" number shows how many delegates each candidate would need coming out of Feb 5 given the rest of the scenario. I think it all points toward an election thats going all the way to Puerto Rico.

Evidence of dirty tricks in California.

Gallup has it within the margin of error. Obama has gained 16 points since January 20, while Clinton has lost two. The momentum of that gain is sure to make a difference on Tuesday. And a small lead in California? zogby has even better news for Obama. Something is happening out there. As for Romney, some good news in California. But a national 20 point deficit against a rival who has won South Carolina does not a nomination make.

Mark Lawson provokes:

The main reason for this renaissance is that all levels of cinema – from the people who put up the budget to the people who pay for tickets – have become less frightened of intelligence and complexity. In its first decades, the people who made movies tended to come – except for an injection of European intellectuals displaced by Hitler – out of mainstream art forms such as vaudeville and Broadway. Now, a producer, director or actor is likely to have been schooled – and then film-schooled – to high levels, and can rely on a potential audience of similar sophistication.

So the film rights to Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd have been available for 30 years, but only now have Hollywood financiers and movie-goers consider its dark content and musical sophistication a viable proposition for cinema. Complex and unsettling fiction – such as Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain – now attract directors and actors in the way once reserved for populist fiction such as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.

 Photographer Masaru Tatsuki spent ten years documenting Japan’s "decotora," short for "decorated trucks," one of the country’s pop culture phenomenons. Tatsuki expains:

I realised that [the truckers] possess a sense of masculinity that is dying out in Japan. I could also understand their feeling of wanting to decorate the tools they use for work. People are surprised that I spent ten years on this project, but it simply takes time to really understand something. And I wanted to really understand the things I wanted to express. That is why it took so long.

Bud Parr thinks so. The worth of literary blogs:

A healthy literary culture is one where not just the books with the biggest marketing budget or buzz should be publicly discussed. This, I believe is one of the greatest assets of the literary blogosphere. It is here where translation is not a dirty word. It is here where the publicity schedule means little. It is here where literary authors from independent presses get equal or better attention than whatever hotty the New York Times is billowing about this week to accommodate the tastes of myriad general readers. This is where being bitty becomes an asset. It’s specific, it’s personal, it’s opinionated. Those traits aren’t mutually exclusive with being critical; in fact they are the very assets that gives criticism life and probably why so many professional writers are finding themselves writing online, inviting comments from their readers, discovering others who happen to share their interests, no matter how specific.

Couldn’t agree more. The ridiculous Hollywood-style roll-out of books – in which they have seven days to make it, or else – does not reward reading or writing. It rewards marketing. The blogosphere can give books – especially those with more to say than gimmicks to flaunt – the time and space to breathe and gain discerning readers. Watch this space over the coming weeks for an attempt to do this some more.

"And for a Republican to be Hillary or Obama, he’ll need to win a large number of moderates and non-Republicans. John McCain has shown that he can do that," – Red State.

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney makes phone calls before meeting with the press during a campaign rally at Freeway Ford February 1, 2008 in Denver, Colorado. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

A reader writes:

I hate to demonstrate the audacity of cynicism here, but isn’t your Gandhi post and its implied take on "non-interventionism" a bit oversimplified? There is no doubt that Gandhi was a pivotal, symbolic figure, and that India in particular and resistance to colonialism in general owes a great deal to his influence. That said, it’s rather difficult to discount the fact that it was only a British Empire massively weakened, financially and military (for reasons having more to do with German guns than with satyagraha…) that finally granted India its independence; that India was followed by a wave of new states claiming their independence not only from Britain but also from the French empire (and of course that many of these states were born as the result of a far bloodier process than what took place in India – see the Algerian Civil War, or Kenya’s Mau Mau for instance), more than suggesting that factors extending far beyond the borders of India were pushing towards the collapse of these two empires at the time; and that the existence of liberal, democratic norms in France and Britain in the first place were fundamentally necessary for the success of Gandhi’s "mirror" strategy?

Yeah – that was one sentence. Maybe that’s how non-violence wins the day.

Does anyone seriously believe that, for instance, rallies in occupied France would have threatened Nazi rule to the same degree that the activities of the French Resistance achieved? What "world opinion" would Hitler have worried about when the only nations entering into his foreign policy calculations were either already at war with him or ruled by dictators of similar persuasions? Are we to suppose that inside every despot is a benevolent heart waiting to come out? To push the parallel a bit, who is going to hold Mahmoud Ahmedinejad up to a mirror when the reflection he hopes to see is there is the closest possible manifestation of Allah’s will on earth, not the ruler of an open society? To the extent that his government cares what the world thinks, it does so solely because of other power’s ability to inflict economic hardship – or worse – on his country.

I understand that you would not fully agree with the more radical implications of Gandhi’s philosophy, but I think the point bears making all the same in light of the profounds effects the Bush administration’s foreign policy bungling has had on your views and the views of many Americans who have undergone similar intellectual conversions. While we as a country have surely learned an important lesson in caution, I fear that there has also been a great blurring of moral clarity. Even if we hesitated to say so, many of us who supported the invasion at the time were in no small part moved by the idea of our nation – finally standing up and confronting the sheer, government-sponsored evil that usually goes without comment in less remembered parts of this world – making it clear that we really do believe the universal values upon which our nation was founded are, well, universal – cleaning up our unfinished business with a mass-murdering despot to show our recognition that the actions of the mass-murdering despots on the other side of the world, and the societies they breed, do in the end affect us all. In retrospect, it seems likely that we attacked the wrong man, in the wrong place, in the wrong time; in any case, the utter mismanagement of the occupation yielded such a disaster that perhaps we’ll never really know what might have been (though the surprising effectiveness of the surge makes this point far more of a question mark than it might otherwise have been for the moment.)

But the bungling of the invasion doesn’t erase the challenge that produced it in the first place. We’ve acquired a fairly good idea of what doesn’t work, to be sure. We could respond to this by sinking into a comfort zone somewhere in between the relativist platitudes of the multiculturalist left that we can’t judge what takes place in other cultures and the crotchety declarations of the paleocon right we’ll be fine and safe leaving well enough alone within our (well-fenced) borders. Of course, our doing so won’t make it any truer for the nation that will remain the preponderant economic and military power in the civilized world for the foreseeable future; but we can do that. Or we can recognize, as Americans of all people out, that courage in defense of freedom is a brave and noble thing; that relativism of the sort that would equate resistance to tyranny and genocide with the acts themselves is reprehensible; and that it remains one of the great challenges confronting our generation to figure out how, without losing cognizance of our own limitations as a nation, we can continue to stand firmly in defense of the freedoms we enjoy, in solidarity with those who would enjoy them elsewhere. It is the question that confronted us throughout the Cold War in our dealings with the Soviet Union; and need I remind you that Reagan’s denunciations of the Evil Empire surely had a far greater effect with the amplification provided by his massive arms buildup, or that we must also deal with the legacy of his actions in Latin America… Was that the right balance then? What is the proper balance today, as the same dilemma that once confronted us in the Eastern bloc now confronts us in all the areas of the world we wrote off to autocracy while we were preoccupied with the importance of confronting Communism? I wish I knew. But I do know that closing our eyes and hoping the problem will disappear if we elect a more likeable President, while gently enjoining future Saddam Husseins to look themselves in the mirror, is no answer at all.